An Eclectic Journal of Opinion, History, Poetry and General Bloviating

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Charles Lindbergh—The Idol With Feet of Clay

Lindbergh as Isolationist leader.

Note: Adapted
from a post on this date in 2010.

It was 85 years ago
today on May 20, 1927 that a lanky, boyish Charles
Lindbergh took
off from a muddy airfield on Long
Island, New York on his way to becoming “the most famous man in the
world.”

Lindbergh was only 25 years old, an air mail pilot, former barnstormer, and
reserve Army Air Corps officer when
he undertook his attempt to be the first man to fly non-stop across the Atlantic Ocean.

That spring there was a rush to claim the $25,000 Orteig Prize for the first trans-Atlantic flight. Many of the most famous names in aviation,
including Richard E. Byrd were in
the hunt. All other competitors chose
multi-engine aircraft, usually tri-motors with two to four men crews. The results were often disastrous. The completion cost six lives in three
separate crashes and four men were injured in another.

On April 26 two U.S. Navy fliers
were killed on take-off from Langley
Field in Virginia testing their Keystone Pathway tri-motor
bi-plane. French aviators Charles
Nungesser and François Coli took
off from Paris for New York on May 8
in their Levasseur PL-8 biplane L'Oiseau Blanc but were lost, probably near the coast of Maine.
Meanwhile other competing teams were setting up at adjacent Long
Island air fields waiting for the weather to clear. Clarence
Chamberlin and Bert Acosta were prepping their Bellanca WB-2 monoplane, Columbia,
in which they had just set a worlds endurance record by staying aloft
circling Manhattan for more than 51
hours covering over 4,000 miles—longer than the distance to Paris. But internal disputes on the team result in
an injunction being issued to prevent the flight. Byrd and his team were recovering from a test
crash in April and refitting their plane.

Lindbergh’s strategy was different.
He had a single engine, single seat monoplane built especially for the
effort by Ryan Aeronautical Corp. in
San Diego at a cost of $10,000 and
financed by St. Louis businessmen. He named it The Spirit of St. Louis. The plane was stripped of every
“non-essential” including a radio, navigation equipment and even a parachute to
enable it to lighten its weight. To
increase fuel capacity a tank over the nose covered what would be a
windshield. The pilot had to stick his
head out a side window to see ahead.

On May 10 Lindbergh flew to his aircraft to Curtis Field setting a new transcontinental speed record in the
process. As he began final test flights
and tune-ups Byrd’s backers forbad him to make the crossing pending more
information on the fate of Nungesser and Coli. Lindbergh completed his
tests with a total of 27 hours of air time, less than would be required for the
crossing but he determined to proceed so as not to risk damage to the plane in
testing.

He also determined that with the weight of the extra fuel required for the
crossing, Curtis Field’s runway was too short for a safe take off. On May 19 Byrd gallantly offered the use of
his adjacent base at Roosevelt Field, which
had a longer runway.

The next morning in a persistent drizzle and low ceiling, the heavily
overloaded Spirit of St. Louis had to
be hand pushed through the mud on the field to begin its take off and used
almost every foot of runway before taking off, barely clearing telephone lines
at the end of the runway. Lindbergh
gambled on taking off under less than ideal conditions knowing that his
competitors would wait for clear skies.
He hoped the sky would clear over the Atlantic.

Much of the way he flew by starlight and dead reckoning and was not
completely confident he was on course until he crossed the Irish coast. During the
fight he had to fly over storm clouds at 10,000 feet and descend to the wave
tops to prevent icing. As he crossed the
French coast word to went out on the radio that he was heading for Paris.

By the time he reached Le Bourget air field at 10:22 PM local
time on May 21 after 33 ½ hours in the air covering about 3,600 miles, 150,000
people crowed the field to greet him.
Virtually pulled from his plane as the crowd surrounded it, he was
hoisted on shoulders and paraded for nearly half an hour before French police
and soldiers could rescue him and his plane.

Spontaneous street celebrations broke out in New York and other cities has
they got the word of the accomplishment.
The hero was feted in France and presented with the Légion d'honneur by President Gaston
Doumergue. President Calvin Coolidge ordered
Heavy Cruiser the USS Memphisto bring Lindbergh and his plane back to
America. On June 11, escorted by much of
the fleet, waves of Army and Navy bombers and fighters, and the Navy airship USS
Los Angeles, the Memphis
steamed up the Potomac to Washington, D.C. Coolidge awarded him the Distinguished
Flying Cross and the Post Office
unveiled a hastily printed commemorative Air Mail stamp featuring the Spirit of St. Louis.

Two days later he was given a ticker-tape
parade down Fifth Avenue in New
York and honored at a banquet at Hotel
Commodore with 3,500 of the city’s political and economic elite in
attendance.

And that was just the beginning of the waves of adulation he would
feel. He was soon off on a non-stop
national tour taking him to all 48 states and 92 cities giving 147 speeches to
promote aviation. By some estimates fully a quarter of the American population
got a chance to see Lindbergh and his air craft personally and almost all of
the rest saw him on newsreels or heard his voice on the radio.

Meanwhile, without much notice Chamberlin took off on June 4 for an even
longer successful flight to Eisleben,
Germany and Byrd flew to Paris on June 29 with three crewmen but could not
land because of fog and had to ditch his plane near the English Channel.

Lindbergh claimed hisOrteig
Prize, a promotion to Colonel in the Air Corps Reserves, and a Medal
of Honor. When he finally got a
chance to breath, he wrote an acclaimed memoir of the flight, We, a
runaway best seller.

The rest of his life was punctuated by bliss, triumph, numbing personal
tragedy, and a foray into Isolationist politics
that would deeply tarnish image, combat and some redemption.

First the bliss. In December 1927 he
met Anne Morrow, the beautiful and
cultivated daughter of the Ambassador to
Mexico. She was said to be the only
woman the straight laced flyer had ever asked out. They married on May 27, 1929.

Their beloved, curly haired first born son, Charles Lindbergh, Jr. was abducted from the family home in East Amwell, New Jersey and held for
ransom. After a 10 week search,
including the payment of $50,000 in ransom, the boy’s body was found buried
less than three miles from the Lindbergh estate. It was the first Crime of the Century. After
a year and a half some of the ransom was traced to Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German immigrant living in the Bronx.
Hauptmann was convicted in a sensational trial and quickly executed,
although doubts have circulated for years whether Hauptmann was either a patsy
for the real killer, or a member of a wider conspiracy.

Even before the execution Lindbergh decamped in secrecy with his wife and
second son and took a quiet residence in a village in Kent and after three years to a private French island. He busied himself with medical research,
including co-developing an early model of an artificial heart pump that would
be the basis of later work in the area.

From 1936 to ‘39 the Army commissioned him to assess the German and Italian
air forces. He was personally escorted
by Luftwaffe commander
Hermann Göring on some of these occasions and was somewhat deceived about
the strength of the of the German air arm.
Lindbergh became convinced it was, at least in the short run, so
advanced of anything the British, French, or the United States had that it was
virtually invincible. He also, as an
engineer, came to admire the “efficiency” of Fascist regimes.

As storm clouds gathered over Europe, Lindbergh returned the U.S. and
undertook assignments for the Air Corps. But he privately warned the British against
war with Germany and advocated standing aside if it went to war with the Soviet Union. He expressed similar opinions in a widely
read article in the Reader’s Digest in 1939.

After war broke out in Europe he was convinced that British propaganda
would draw America in as it had in World
War I. He resigned his Air Corps
commission to campaign against the war assuming leadership in the America First isolationist movement and
speaking to mammoth rallies in New York’s Madison
Square Garden and Soldier Field in
Chicago. He drifted from arguing
neutrality toward Germany to arguing that it was the necessary bulwark against Communism.

In a speech at Des Moines, Iowa on
September 11, 1941 he claimed the three groups, “pressing this country toward
war [are] the British, the Jewish
and the Roosevelt Administration.” Heavily criticized for overt anti-Semitism, he claimed to have
nothing personally against Jews, but stood by his charges. Lindbergh, an advocate of eugenics, and un-abashed advocate of
“racial solidarity” was tied to overt anti-Semites like his close friend Henry Ford who boasted to an FBI agent that, “Whenever he visits,
all we talk about is the Jews.”

President Franklin Roosevelt, chaffing at the effectiveness of Lindbergh in rallying
opposition to Lend-Lease and other
assistance to Britain, privately opined that he believed Lindbergh was a Nazi.
Certainly the German propaganda machine delighted in featuring his
big crowds at America First rallies.

Whatever his pre-war sympathies, Lindbergh threw himself into the war
effort after Pearl Harbor. His attempt to re-join the Air Corps was
coldly turned down by Secretary of War
Henry L. Stimson on direct orders of the President. Instead he signed on as a technical
consultant on aircraft production and contributed significant improvements to
both production techniques and the design of several air craft.

In 1944 United Aircraft sent him
as a technical consultant to the Pacific theater. He “tested” various aircraft by flying combat
missions with Marine pilots and
later with Air Corps P-38 twin
tailed fighters. In all he flew more
than 50 combat missions as a civilian wining high praise from the service
pilots he flew with. He was shot down
and survived several days on a raft before being rescued.

Lindbergh returned to the States a hero once more to continue his engineering
services.

After the war a tour of the Nazi extermination camps shook him to the
core. Yet he privately believed that the
advance of Communism in Eastern Europe
validated his pre-war position. But he
refrained from re-entering political debate.

He continued to promote aviation and later space exploration. President
Eisenhower restored his commission in the Air Force and promoted him to Brigadier
General.

Although apparently devoted to his wife, the author of several acclaimed
books of essays, Lindbergh secretly conducted affairs with three German women
from 1957 to until his death in 1974 and fathered five children between the Hesshaimer sisters, Brigitte and Marietta. He visited these families once or twice a
year. Anne Morrow Lindbergh, mother of
his five surviving children, apparently went to her death in 2001 without
knowing.

Lindbergh’s final years were spent advocating for environmental
protection and the preservation of the cultures of primitive people he
encountered in the Philippines. He wrote
widely and saw the partial rehabilitation of his reputation although he avoided
public appearances. He lived quietly on
the Hawaiian Island of Maui where he died on August 26, 1974 at the age of 72.

2 comments:

Contrary to popular belief, Lindbergh was not the first to fly the Atlantic; he was merely the first to fly it SOLO. The first crossing was all the way back in 1919 by British pilots Alcock & Brown. http://www.aviation-history.com/airmen/alcock.htm

I have touched on this in an earlier blog post. Compared to Lindbergh's it was a much shorter hop--from St. Johns Newfoundland to Ireland, about 1840 miles. It won a prize for flying between "...any point in the United States of America, Canada or Newfoundland and any point in Great Britain or Ireland" in 72 continuous hours. The Orteig Prize stipulated a flight between continental locations. It is also true that no one had duplicated Alcock & Browns flight since 1919, which spurred the prize. Of course Lindbergh soloed, but it was not a stipulation of the prize. He did acknowledge the British pilots in his remarks after landing in Paris.